Calling Bullshit On Violence In Georgia

It was refreshing and surprising, sadly, to hear Dick Williams call-out a questioneer during a U.S. Representative Paul Broun gathering at the end of today’s Georgia Gang show as an example of negativity in Georgia news and politics.

Williams was refering to a deeply misguided person who asked *Who’s going to shoot Obama?* to Rep. Paul Broun at a Tuesday, February 22, 2011 townhall meeting at the Oglethorpe County Commission chamber.

Whether in public or within family gatherings and conversation, violence-laced claptrap and rhetoric should not be tolerated, especially here in a state where it’s been allowed to flourish, without pushback, for far too long. Let’s hope the Secret Service is making that jackass squirm now.

Rep. Paul Broun is so deeply out of it that the offensive question did not register as deeply wrong, immediately, within him. Or else he, Broun, would have called it out right then and there, live as it happened, at the town hall meeting. He did not do that. He said merely, *Next question.* To laughs. Pitiful.

It took Blake Aued going back and clarifying a question he could barely hear (and a follow-up one too), and writing about it on his blog. Aued’s name, for doing so, has gone nationwide over the weekend. See Twitter for a quick example of the power of Aued’s blog post on the matter.

And these are just the folk who could manage to spell his name right.

Georgia Gang Too Cool For School

Well color me WRONG! All this time I’ve been blogging about what fuddy-duddys they were on the Georgia Gang. Then the Mostly Media roving iTeam snapped this shot of one of the Georgia Gang regulars sporting so much chrome Yours Truly had to avert mine eyes… at the kickoff party/fundraiser in Inman Park Sunday night, March 22, 2009, for the re-election campaign of social media-driven Atlanta councilperson, Kwanza Hall.

My my my! Guess who it is, win a prize. Prize to be determined by the Mostly Media party committee.

Solving Atlanta’s Crime Statistics Mystery

As I handed my kid her Sunday morning plate of blueberry pancakes and simultaneously wrenched the remote out of her hand so I could tune-in the Georgia Gang (I’m getting really good at this maneuver), away goes Sponge Bob and up pops Phil Kent, who was deep in the momentary thrall of calling Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin “a liar.”

Kent says Mayor Franklin is telling outright lies when she says, as she did again recently, that crime in Atlanta is, statistically, down. Kent says Franklin is lying because crimes in the City of Atlanta are actually up, but there’s no way to prove this because APD is not providing accurate stats for interested parties – the “interested parties” being local journalism outlets such as The Sunday Paper and the AJC; that any efforts by journos-with-money to find reliable and accurate crime stats are being thwarted by APD and/or, I presume, City Hall.

Kent cited The Sunday Paper’s recent story by editor Stephanie Ramage about crime stats in Atlanta’s intown neighborhoods as his journo-source in this matter. In the story, Ramage is hinting of a gross cover-up or manipuation by APD of the actual crime stats in Atlanta – a deeply serious charge with criminal implications for those involved, and an historical issue former APD deputy chief  Louis Arcangeli has never been shy about going on the record about, at the expense of his APD job too. From The Sunday Paper:

“You are talking about a department that has a proven, documented track record of manipulating the numbers, so you have to consider that the police department might be doing it again,” says Louis Arcangeli, a former deputy chief of the APD who now teaches criminal justice at Georgia State University. “The amount of public concern is completely at odds with the numbers, and that’s troubling.”

(And the matter of The Sunday Paper being a credible news org was laughingly and haughtily dismissed by Jeff Dickerson on today’s Georgia Gang episode, but that’s a whole other can ‘o worms for a whole other blog post right now. Still, what else we got to help us out in the urgent and critical need for data-driven, reliable journalism? The Panda Press (AJC)?. Thus my plea here. Keep reading.)

Whatever Kent says, Mayor Franklin’s numerous attempts to cite magical statistics about crime in Atlanta are not getting any leverage in the court of public perception. Citizens simply feel crime is out of control. Everyone feels victimized by crime. (This I know from my own citizen reporting on the matter.) People feel Chief Pennington is out-to-lunch and indifferent to their perception. Pennington sure doesn’t help when he says citizens concerns are based on citizens’ “misperceptions.”

To heck with Chief Pennington though, as Atlantans Together Against Crime (ATAC) continues to enlist thousands to their grass-roots cause, with the next ATAC rally scheduled for Monday, February 23rd at 5pm at the corner of MLK and Joseph Lowery.

The big problem for Mayor Franklin is that the stories from the droves of crime victims in Atlanta are now being heard. It doesn’t really matter if crime is up or down, come to think about it. The thing that matters is, because of social media and the networks created in that medium, stories can now be told in new media ways they never were before. The pain of the people comes through loud and clear online… now that harrowing tales of death and survival on the mean street of the ATL are so easily told and shared. Yes, despite City Hall’s best efforts to tone down the citizenry’s rhetoric, voices will be heard.

But that’s one piece of the new media pie in the matter of Atlanta’s magical crime stats. The other is the hard, cold reality of what the crime stats really are now. Who do you believe? Are they up or are they down? Let’s put the matter to Professor Leonard Witt and Kennessaw State University (KSU). Why this place? Why this person?

Because Witt and KSU just received some nice bucks (1.5 million to be precise) to create The Center for Sustainable Journalism. Given the mission and the message of The Center for Sustainable Journalism (CSJ), seems Atlanta’s mysterious crime stats would be the perfect place to apply the resources KSU now has.

From the press release about The Center for Sustainable Journalism (CSJ):

KENNESAW, Ga. (February 7, 2009) In the midst of an annual conference designed to pinpoint the Southeast’s niche in the digital media revolution, Kennesaw State University announced receipt of a $1.5 million gift from the Harnisch Foundation to establish a center to research and develop innovative ways to produce and distribute news.

Kennesaw State President Daniel S. Papp announced the award and the creation of The Center for Sustainable Journalism Feb. 7 at the SoCon09 “Unconference” attended by more than 300 business, non-profit and media professionals, bloggers and digital media enthusiasts.

The center will be overseen by Leonard Witt, Kennesaw State’s Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication, eminent scholar and associate professor, who organized the SoCon09 conference. Witt is a pioneer in developing community-supported journalism models and exploring the potential of online social networks to disseminate news.

Full press release here.

Crime and the APD’s ability to control it aside, what is sustainable in Atlanta now are the networks and the crowd sourcing and the social media structure that would allow for deep and comprehensive dissemination of the journalistic, data-driven findings of a journalism project that would help the citizens of all metro Atlanta  get to the heart of our mysterious and sometimes magical crime stats situation.

So what’dya say, CSJ? Wanna get crackin’ on tackling a community-based journalism project right in your own backyard? Enquiring minds need to know, and it might help a lot of people sleep better at night. And I’m always good for a quickie video package or two.

Georgia Gang and Georgia Political Misc.

Jeff Dickerson finally got a working pulse on Sunday’s Georgia Gang. Kicking ass with a righteous fury. All Dick Williams can do is parrot-loop something, anything, he heard on Fox News about Joe The Plumber, which is what currently passes for enlightened political discourse. Or babble about the Fair Tax, which no one seems to have the slightest clue about when it comes down to it. Alexis Scott was feisty and fired-up. Martha admits that the Georgia U.S. Senate race is “tight.” I gotta go get a life and bail on this Peach-flavored cluster-fuck.

In other matters… if Saxby and Martin end-up in a runoff, Jason Pye, Georgia’s most wired and fired Libertarian, and on the Bob Barr campaign payroll in some capacity, is threatening to throw his support to Martin. That’s just how fiscally hideous Saxby has been.

Live Blogging The Georgia Gang

The entire Georgia Gang show was mostly total gibberish today as everyone talked wildly over each other about race, polls and Obama-as-rock star. Audio dudes the world over no doubt had complete meltdowns.

But I was able to make out at least one full statement worth quoting: Alexis Scott when discussing the specific amount of (Cindy McCain’s) houses that John McCain couldn’t recall last week, “He’s (McCain) struggling to prove he’s not a kept man.”

And on what planet does withholding liquor (but not beer and wine) “cut down on binge drinking?” as Dick Williams stated?

After listening to today’s Georgia Gangsta audio cluster-fuck, I need a cocktail. And it’s not even 9am!

Today’s Georgia Gang Shop of Strange Hairdo’s

The thing I hate about commentary and TV (as opposed to commentary and radio) is that the visual is often ridiculously distracting. Imagine, for instance, if you had to LOOK at Neal Boortz while listening too. There simply would be no show. Tucker Carlson’s visual silliness comes to mind too.

Taking the cake today for visual distraction, or maybe wearing the cake on her head, was Alexis Scott. I wish I’d Tivo’d the show so I had a screen shot here for your esquiring and enquiring minds. (Hint, hint: If anyone did bother to Tivo Georgia Gang for Sunday August 17, 2008, please send appropriate file to Mostly Media.)

Scott’s tightly-curled strawberry platinum-yet-kinda-blond confection of a bombshell placed atop her otherwise lovely head made my kid holler, “Why do you watch that old-people show? Those people need hair cuts.”

The closet demo of Ms. Scott’s lemon meringue pie-do I can come up with is this: